I have gone back to an old pursuit, cleaning up tatty images, this
time of garter stall plates for my own enjoyment. This has taken
ages; I have had to learn two new graphics programs, with much help
from Rob Davison, the author of Compo which enormously improved my
productivity: down from most of a day for complex images to an hour
and a half each. Anyhow the result is that very little genealogy
has been done.

I got fed up with Google queries pulling in all the out-of-date
records on my old Freewebs site, so deleted virtually everything
there. A chorus of two complaints erupted, showing that they had
not noticed my promises to move. Apologies to anyone who was truly
inconvenienced but the only real way to be sure you are going to
up-to-date information is to start with
http://powys.org.

Much more exciting has been that I have moved my database from the
unsupported Generations on PCs to the still supported Reunion on
the Mac. Reunion is, of course, what Generations started out as
until the PC version was sold and now lost. Fortunately the
Generations files can still be converted to work on Reunion and
the Support staff kindly did this for me in the space of a few hours.
The advantage of this conversion is both that there is no loss of
data and that the program is substantially the same so that there
is no learning difficulty. The only other transfer that was
loss-less was into TMG, The Master Genealogist, but I just did not
like its user interface.

Of course this also meant that I had to acquire a Mac, to give me
my third and very different operating system here (I have a fourth,
Unix, but really have yet to understand it, let alone get start to
use it). Fortunately Apple have recently brought out the Mac Mini
so the price was not the extravagance that Macs used to be.
Learning to use it has not been hard though I have yet to find how
to persuade the directory viewers to be permanently less clunky and
childlike. I did have to completely reinstate everything after the
link to my RISC Machine slowed to a crawl, doubtless caused by one
of the upgrades I had downloaded (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

Major contributions coming in have been, as ever, John Ravilous
with his continued good research and interesting speculations on
mid-medieval English families; Martyn Freeth on early Powys
ancestors, and Paul Waller on the ancestry and family of Fanny Worth.

The main database now stands at 19,561 people, of whom 7192 are
ancestors and 7706 relatives with the rest being in-laws. Not all
these numbers are on this website as they are living people and
I like to obtain agreement before including them.

I nearly forgot: I've managed to put about 50 pictures of ancient
ancestors and relations onto my site. The only difference is that
while there is a link from my site, the sizes of the picture files
means that I cannot store them there. Instead they are on a little
RISC OS machine that is now thirteen years old but quietly hums
away and presents the images to the few that will enquire. Any
contributions of images that I do not have will be enormously
appreciated.